BADLANDS

With a sense of trepidation, regret and inevitability, many North Dakotans are watching the face of the Badlands change.
During the past several decades, a dense network of roads serving oil development spread across the sandstone, clay and scoria buttes and ravines that set this part of the world apart from the prairie. Producing wells thump away into the Badlands quiet. Pipelines snake across the rough terrain, fording beneath the sandy bottom of the Little Missouri River.

The carving of big ranches into ranchettes has begun, so the rich and famous or those who want to be can have their piece of the Badlands.
The differences are real, identifiable and concrete.
-- The Bismarck Tribune